Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 7
work on equality alongside Sara Ahmed's theorisation of the affective messiness behind everyday concepts, I argue
that re-thinking sociologically about both critical thinking and difference is particularly relevant against the backdrop of
the 'neo-liberalisation' of the academy, where critique has arguably shifted its form and focus.
Sociology of Education 2
W525, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
Lakes and Oceans: Educational Journeys, Social Class and the Mezzanine Condition in South Wales 2001-
2014
Miles, P.
(University of Bedfordshire)
This paper shall concentrate on dynamics and longer-term effects of educational transition and post-educational
consolidations amongst a sample of 'working class' young people in early 21st century south east Wales. The
respondents (born during the Miners Strike of 1984-5, interviewed in 2000-02 and 2012-14 and now approaching the
age of thirty) offer a detailed commentary of educational and career ambitions resulting in a honed individualized
strategy for self-betterment and autonomy. The emerging narrative of transition (and expectancies for the future)
emerged as loose, reflexive and risky, pivoting upon highly individualized strategies for betterment via educational
credentialism and by a tacit acceptance of the potential injuries delivered by self-distancing from friends, youth
cultures, community and the embedded class structures of locale delivered via a standardized, routine engagement
with higher education. What emerges is recognition and inhabitation of a space of disengagement between society
and the individual, a journey-phase of a risk stratagem that embodies a self-individuated zone between securities of
the locale and social class. This is the ante-room of late-modern anxiety driven by biographically-centrist identity
maintenance, situational and anticipatory factors in life, experienced as teenagers and as young adults making sense
of the educational pathway, well trodden. We view a 'mezzanine condition', halfway between the comfortable,
socialized and structural securities of the bounded locale (the 'lake') and the boundless, deregulated, capitalist 'ocean'
of the modern world economy. The question remains as to whether these young adults now see the mezzanine as a
state of amnesty or as a prison.
Responding to the Mental Health and Well-being Agenda in Adult Community Learning
Lewis, L.
(University of Wolverhampton)
In the United Kingdom, changes in the policy, funding and commissioning landscape for mental health and well-being
are posing opportunities and challenges for adult community learning (ACL). Opportunities include increased
recognition 10 of, and funding for, the 'wider benefits' of learning, whereas challenges include the risks of ACL
provision becoming hijacked by a health and well-being
agenda that compromises its primary educational purpose and values. This paper engages with these policy debates
through reporting on a study of mental health ACL that employed the capabilities approach along with two other
complementary areas of social theory – recognition theories and theories of capitals. Its aim was to explore the means
through which ACL impacts mental health and to draw out implications for policy and practice. Findings from focus
groups with
adult learners and tele-discussions with ACL practitioners revealed three main means through which the provision
helped generate interlinked mental health and educational capabilities: providing recognition, generating resources
(capitals), and enhancing agency freedom. Elaborating these findings, the paper sets out an argument for
interpretation of the mental health and well-being agenda in
ACL in terms of a humanistic, liberatory pedagogy that encompasses feminist praxis, and draws out policy
implications across the areas of ACL and mental health.
BSA Annual Conference 2015 280
Glasgow Caledonian University